UK Uncut protests have no effect

Sometimes no change at all can be as interesting as dramatic movements and that is certainly the case when we look at brands that have been targeted by UK Uncut over the past five months.

UK Uncut, the protest movement, has attempted to shame brands that it claims have dodged UK taxes. A series of actions began in the UK on October 27 last year when Vodafone’s Oxford Street London store was closed by protesters. Similar shut-downs have occurred across the UK since then and following The March for the Alternative on March 26 a number of stores including Topshop and Boots on Oxford Street were closed and Fortnum and Mason occupied.

But the net result of the action on consumer perception has been zero. If we look at five of the key brands targeted; Vodafone, Boots, Tesco and the Arcadia Group’s BHS and Topshop there has been no real movement in their corporate Reputation score in BrandIndex since the protests started with the combined score of the five being +77 back on Oct 24 and a near identical +78 on April 4.

So UK Uncut has either failed to interest people in its campaign, or has managed to interest them but not moved their views of the targeted companies in one way or another. The brands' Attention scores, which measure whether people have heard anything at all about a given brand, show that their problem is the former.

Once again we see that there has been no significant change in the number of people hearing anything (either positive or negative) about the brands.

We can conclude that the actions of UK Uncut are going largely unnoticed (at least in terms of the specific brands it targets) and therefore cannot impact on the general populations’ views.